Sign-In
Cart
Mule Boy
Audio Book
General FictionLiterary Fiction
Currently unavailable to order
Please enter your email and a message will be sent to you when this product becomes available on our website.
Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
Published: Mar 10 2026
Weight: 0.05
Height: 0.33 Width: 5.13 Depth: 6.70
Language: English
An elegiac novel of men lost in a coal mining disaster and the boy who survives to tell the story
On New Year's Day, 1929, Ondro Prach, the thirteen-year-old son of Slovak immigrants in Pennsylvania coal country, begins a new job as mule boy. He knows the danger--his father died in the mines--but he is proud of his position handling the animal that hauls cartloads of coal from shafts deep within the earth to the surface. After Ondro earns the trust of the miners and the mule in his charge, the room the men are working collapses and their fate is sealed.
From that moment onward, Ondro carries the hard memory of that day, a burden that leads to addiction and imprisonment, costing him his family. But, years later, when the miners' loved ones come searching for answers, he finds the strength to share what the men spoke of and prayed for in the pitch black.
Told in incantatory prose set to the rhythm of human breath, this sublime novel turns the memento mori into a meditation not only on death but on what it takes to tunnel through darkness and live.
Also from
Krivak, Andrew
Also in
Literary Fiction
Elizabeth Spencer: Novels & Stories (Loa #344): The Voice at the Back Door / The Light in the Piazza / Knights and Dragons / Stories
Spencer, Elizabeth
Hardcover
James Fenimore Cooper: The Leatherstocking Tales Vol. 1 (Loa #26): The Pioneers / The Last of the Mohicans / The Prairie
Cooper, James Fenimore
Hardcover
The Underworld U.S.A. Trilogy, Volume I: American Tabloid, the Cold Six Thousand; Introduction by Thomas Mallon
Ellroy, James
Hardcover
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Other Stories (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)
Stevenson, Robert Louis
Paperback
Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams: Short Stories, Prose, and Diary Excerpts
Plath, Sylvia
Paperback
The Patrick Melrose Novels: Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, and Mother's Milk
St Aubyn, Edward
Paperback